Sexy Voice and Robo by Iou Kuroda (amazon)

I think everybody (and by everybody, I mean bloggers who read manga) loves Sexy Voice and Robo, and I’ll add my voice to the chorus of praise for this excellent title. It is nice to be surprised by a book and Sexy Voice and Robo had many unexpected elements. Sexy Voice is the nickname of Nico, a 14 year old girl who makes extra money as a hostess on a telephone dating line. Her goals are to become a spy or fortuneteller when she grows up. She loves to people watch. She meets a mysterious old man with underworld connections in a coffee shop and he starts to send her on missions that utilize her unique skills. Nico meets Robo, a man with few social skills who loves to collect toys, when she’s chatting on the telephone dating line. She quickly starts to order Robo around when she needs help investigating her cases.

In some ways this is a difficult book to write about, because the plot is so open and free ranging. There’s an improvisational quality to the events that take place in the book, but Nico does her best to maintain control and manipulate the people around her. It doesn’t seem as if she’d be a sympathetic character, but she is quite engaging due to her enthusiasm and decisiveness as she meets new people and briefly entangles herself in their lives. A strange sort of friendship develops between Nico and Robo – she summons him, he does her bidding, he’s 10 years older than her but it seems like she’s the one who is protective of him.

As Nico continues to investigate the human condition and carry out the missions of the Old Man, the situations she becomes entangled with become more complex. Kuroda’s art incorporates thick lines and a great deal of black and white contrast. The focus is very much on Nico and her reactions to her adventures, and Kuroda manages to convey a great deal of expression in drawings that aren’t overly detailed. He’ll focus on the background and then zero in on the expression on a person’s face – this makes the settings the characters move through seem very tangible. I’m glad that Viz printed this book at a standard size for graphic novels instead of the smaller format usually used for manga, as it is much easier to appreciate the art reproduced at the larger size. I’d hope that Sexy Voice and Robo would appeal to people who like reading graphic novels in general, but who might not always read manga.