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Tamon's B-Side - Book 3

Writer: Carina Mesquita
Carina Mesquita
Sep 13
6 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Written and illustrated by Yuki Shiwasu

Published by Shojo Beat. Released in Japanese February 18 2022, in English October 3, 2023


  • Genre/Category: A contemporary fiction comedy romance manga for 7th-12th graders/young adult readers

  • Targeted Age Group: 12-18 years old (TV Tropes, 2026)

  • Plot Summary: Utage Kinoshita is a fangirl first and a person second, and her obsession with Tamon Fukuhara from her favorite J-Pop idol group F/ACE proves it! But when her part-time cleaning job sends her to her beloved Tamon's home, she learns his vivacious on-stage persona isn't the only side to her favorite idol.

  • Why This Book?: Manga has only gotten more and more popular in recent years. With the rise of anime becoming more mainstream, it's only natural the comics it came from become popular as well. I specifically wanted to choose a shojo series, which is a series directed at adolescent girls and young women. Shojo (Also romanized as shoujo or shōjo) is an often undervalued demographic. Shojo and Josei (manga for a young adult/adult women) are notorious for being slow to get English translations and even less likely to get animated adaptations than their male counterparts. There are a lot of classic shojo manga that still circulate today, like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptors Sakura, but a collection can't survive off classics alone. I wanted to explore a new shojo series and see what new tropes, themes, and character archetypes appear to compare with the manga that was around when I was younger.

Evaluation:

  • Character Exaggeration: In a medium like comics and manga, the characters are often figures who seem larger than life. They've got personalities that seem to big for the pages that contain them, especially in a genre like comedy. Young et. al. mention the importance of "… characters that are unique and believable. People who live between the covers of a book must be as real as people who live across the street." (Young et. al., 2020, p. 19). But make no mistake, believable doesn't mean realistic. " Every feeling in Tamon's B-Side is big and bold. The characters constantly exaggerate their facial expressions and reactions to every little thing. Tamon's anxiety makes him visibly shrink on the page. Fangirling too hard causes Utage to literally explode right in front of the reader. Far from realistic, but right at home in a genre like comedy. But these moments aren't only for laughs. In a way, they visualize the emotional experience of adolescence. Being a teenager comes is an emotional roller coaster. The body and brains of both boys and girls are constantly changing, and those growing pains crank every feeling up to the max. The highs are really high, making you want to explode when something makes you burst with joy. The lows are really low too. You'd be hard pressed to find a teenager who didn't want to disappear after something embarrassing or disappointing happened to them. Teenagers in the real world don't make hearts appear when they see their celebrity crush, or explode from fangirling, but a reader can see those moments, laugh, and say "yeah, that's exactly how it feels."

  • Lines and (Lack of) Color: Unlike Western comics and graphic novels which are typically printed in color, most manga is published in black and white. Color is a great storytelling tool that takes a lot of skill to utilize it effectively, so this is not to say using color makes things easier. (In fact, color can even make things harder.) There are just different challenges that pop up when an artist can't rely on color in their illustrations. If you can't count on ROY G. BIV, you can count on lineart and contrast. Tamon's B-Side uses black, grey and white to create clarity in its panels, and what are called screentones for texture.

    The panel as we read it
    The panel as we read it


    Detail of this panel shows the screentone texture clearly. From far away, it looks like shading, up close it's a bunch of dots. Like magic!
    Detail of this panel shows the screentone texture clearly. From far away, it looks like shading, up close it's a bunch of dots. Like magic!

    Shiwasu also uses linework to build emphasis into character design. Really fine lines for the hair is a classic in manga. So is the trick of filling in darker hair with black and dark gray and keeping lighter haired characters with pale gray or even white.

    In reality, Utage's hair is brown and Tamon's is pink. But here it's all black and gray.
    In reality, Utage's hair is brown and Tamon's is pink. But here it's all black and gray.

    And keeping the face simple save for the big, detailed, expressive eyes are synonymous with shojo.

    Big eyes, bigger feelings! (Do you see the hearts in her eyes?)
    Big eyes, bigger feelings! (Do you see the hearts in her eyes?)

    This delicate linework also contrasts with the bulkier lines and shapes used for comedic emphasis and simple panels.

    I have read many manga, and I personally find Tamon's B-Side very easy to follow. Some manga suffer from pages with too much going on (action series are a big victim of this). While Tamon's B-Side doesn't face the storytelling challenges a more high-stakes series does, clarity is still important. This is a series that a new reader of manga could easily follow, and one a manga veteran can appreciate the artistry of too.

  • Paneling: Panel layout is a highly underappreciated art in comics, graphic novels, and manga. Paneling is the path the reader follows to read the story in sequential art. Something a reader passes over in 10 seconds, but could have taken the artist 10 hours to plan. Bad paneling ruins the tempo of the story, but great paneling is invisible (which is why it's so underappreciated). Japanese manga generally follow different paneling styles to Western comics and vice versa (although nowadays more and more artists from all over the world are borrowing traditions from each other). In Tamon's B-Side, the characters aren't contained to evenly sized squares and rectangles.

    Lots of strangely shaped panels take us through Utage's train of thought.
    Lots of strangely shaped panels take us through Utage's train of thought.

    Panels are strange parallelograms, several float across the page, characters often aren't contained inside their panels.

    Utage has escaped the panels! (This is a technique used a lot to show off a character's outfit, especially in shojo and josei manga.)
    Utage has escaped the panels! (This is a technique used a lot to show off a character's outfit, especially in shojo and josei manga.)

    Sometimes there aren't panels at all. For big, emotional moments, illustrations take up an entire page.

    Important moments get a whole page to themselves.
    Important moments get a whole page to themselves.

    There is still structure, but the structure ebbs and flows. "Connecting the panels and having less sequential formatting is another thing that shoujo has developed. The separation between panels is more ambiguous. There's more open space for them to bleed into one another, or the edges will be touching. It feels less like following an assembly line and more like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Both ways of paneling are good, but the reason that shoujo is more free flowing is because it lends to the atmosphere further." (Colleen's Manga Recs, 2024, 31:34) Other comics and manga can utilize these techniques too, but they aren't nearly as common. This exploratory structure is a staple in the language shojo manga. Admittedly, Tamon's B-Side doesn't take this dreamy paneling to the extreme level of a manga like Sailor Moon, but it's still there. It's incredible to see the language of a manga demographic continue on, even decades later. Like any language, it changes over time; but the principles are still around. Tamon's B-Side is a funny "what if" fantasy that would be at home in a library's manga collection. This would be a great series for an adolescent girl who is a fan of J-Pop or K-Pop, since a lot of the idol fan culture shown in the story will be familiar to them. It would also be a great, encouraging read for girls who struggle with self confidence. A protagonist like Utage who is shamelessly herself no matter what life throws at her is really encouraging. An anime/manga fan creator I follow puts it well: "Utage from Tamon's B-Side is the definition of 'to be cringe is to be free.' We already know that Utage is a humongous fangirl, and she's definitely not afraid to be cringe! She doesn't care if her younger siblings think she's a loser. She doesn't care if she's over the top, or having to work a part-time job just to be able to afford merchandise. And she doesn't care to impress other fangirls… Utage embodies what every woman and girl should aspire to, and that is to be unapologetically you." (Laura Neuzeth, 2026, 0:01)

References:

 


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Created by Carina Mesquita for UNT INFO 5421 Fall 2026

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