^One-Shot
Awakened Dreams

A real little gem. This is one of the best one-shots I’ve read. It’s story ir really simple and plain if just explained but, here it’s presented in a real clever way that makes you "discover" the truth yourself.

I’m not even sure the above information is correct. This manga divides it’s plot in seven different characters, and goes through all of them one at a time. Every character comes with different art work, some of it is even colored, and as there’s not much info on-line about it, I’m not sure it’s all from the same artist.

Anyway, really interesting read about a murder. Won’t take much of your time, maybe 5 minutes. Really interesting and intelligent.

• Personal Enjoyment: 5/5

^One-Shot
Stray Dog

Description: A warrior, plundering the people for money, finds a military dog, a creation that with the power of a dog and the intelligence of a human and takes the dog in as his own and becomes the dog’s master.

Genre: Adventure, Action
Author: Arakawa Hiromu
Artist: Arakawa Hiromu
Year: 1999

This one-shot is the first work piece by Arakawa, Full Metal Alchemist’s mangaka.

The main character, your usual strong, good guy, who’s just living without any higher objective, finds a Military Dog kid after fighting some thieves.

Military Dogs are created through magic and chemistry. They are "people" stronger than humans and more loyal than dogs.

He frees the Dog but, he follows him everywhere. He ends up having to accept him and keeping him for himself.

Although you can see in the little details that this manga wasn’t as worked as say Full Metal (maybe it’s just because the scanlation I got is crap), it’s very enjoyable and the humor we’ve come accustomed to in her other novels shows here too.

Eventually, we learn that Fultac (the "hero’s" name) has a bounty on his head and that a bounty hunter is looking for him.

Fultac and Kilka’s relation is funny and enjoyable to see.

The bounty hunter has a really strong Military Dog.

He finds Fultac and the battle begins. Bartley sends his dog to fight Kilka, it’s obvious she’s no match to him.

Meanwhile, Fultac and Bartley get it on. The fight had some cool stuff, specially that "who told you a mage can’t fight?".

Now I’m not going into much more details on the plot, because I don’t wanna spoil it.

Just know that some more stuff happens and there’s some unexpected revelations.

A really cool one-shot. Also quite big for a one-shot, will entertain you for longer. The art was very good too, almost at Full Metal’s level. And by reading this one-shot, you can also witness Arakawa’s first public demonstration of her fixation with "military dogs" lol.

• Personal Enjoyment: 5/5

One-Shot
Roh Kembali
Spirit Returns

Description: Although Kate is an outcast in his class, he constantly bullies a guy called Addy. One day, something unfortunate happened. A student got into an accident and was killed on the spot. The weird part is… Addy started to glare at Kate whenever they meet… What could be the meaning of this…?

Genre: Supernatural, Tragedy
Author: Oga
Artist: Oga
Year: 2008

Cool one-shot. Pretty short but, nice. It’s about a bully that starts getting some weird reactions from the boy he bullies after a student gets run over by a truck.

I’m not going to write what happened next, because it would spoil it to anyone who might read it. Even though it’s nothing special, it’s well done and the ending surprised me.

I liked the art, it looks modern lol

It’s funny how sometimes we are the last ones to realizes what’s happening to our own self.

• Personal Enjoyment: 4/5

One-Shot
City In The Sea

Description: It’s a textless oneshot (full color) about a girl and her life out on a flooded city.

Genre: Drama, mature, psychological
Author: Sahara Masaki
Artist: Sahara Masaki

This is a really weird one-shot. It’s really short, just 12 pages, has no text and every page is colored.

There’s not much of a plot. It just shows a little girl living on a flooded world. She seems to be a contracted assassin. And so, the manga just shows her tricking and killing a man, getting her payment and an ending moment where she remembers what it was like before everything got flooded.

The girl herself doesn’t make much sense to me as a believable character because she first kills a man in cold blood, showing no emotion, and then acts all childish when collecting the money and all sentimental remembering her times playing with her friends and family.

As for the art, it’s all done in a very sketch-like style. The only thing I actually liked were two backgrounds where you could see the city underwater.

So, there’s really nothing going on in this one-shot and I doubt I’m missing the "point", if there’s one. But, it’s so short that I really didn’t have time to get bored and not like it lol. Still, not something I would pay for, no matter how much.

• Personal Enjoyment: 2/5

One-Shot
Forest Bear

This was very interesting, funny and really short one-shot.

It was done as a gag for Weekly Shounen Champion. It’s like a mini-joke, not really supposed to make sense. It’s like a light way of making us know about some of the horrible stuff that animals are put through in cosmetic company’s labs.

So, not much to say about four pages. It’s available at Stray’s.

One-Shot
Death Note

This one-shot takes place 3 years after the Light’s death. The public doesn’t know L’s and Kira’s death.

A new "Kira" appears. He only kills old people in terminal states that want to die or that their families want them to die, like some sort of euthanasia.

All the characters reappear. Matsuda maintains his open-minded spirit towards the use of the death notes.

It seems that Riuk’s actions in the human and the fact that he took human apples to the shinigami world are making other shinigamis interested in the human world, like it it happened to Rem. The shinigami who took the death note this time is called Midra.

It’s cool that Near recognizes both L’s and Light’s intellect as really intelligent people. 

This chapter also shows that Light must really have been someone strong-minded in order to use the death note. Since the one now could bare realizing that he was actually a murderer.

I think the true objective of this one-shot was to show the development of Near ’s character and how he tries to imitate and follow the original L’s personality. I personally  don’t like the way Near is thinking, because he could probably catch this new "Kira" quickly and put an end to the killings. But, on another point, this "Kira" is probably a dumb person only trying to imitate Kira, and he probably won’t pose much difficult to the Japanese police, since they already know about death notes.

There was also a nice poster as an extra.