The beginning of a new week can only mean one thing: time for new Weekly Shonen Jump! This is where Jacob investigates the latest and greatest in the magazine, telling you what’s worth your time and what’s not. You can find coverage of other series under the tag Jump Time. Here’s i tell c chapter 7.
It’s practically an unwritten rule at this point that, the better your debut, the worse your chances are at turning out to be a good series. We see this in reverse with Witch Watch and Nine Dragons’ Ball Parade: two series that started out a little lacklustre, but have since improved immensely. On the other hand, we have i tell c: a series that started extremely strong, but has since slowly declined. Chapter 7 is just the culmination of that.
To be fair, i tell c had a lot more to prove than those two other series: it’s not hard to imagine a baseball manga shaping up in the long run, nor the new work from SKET Dance author Kento Shinohara. A mystery series in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, however, is a rarity we’ve not seen for many years. As a result, leading up to chapter 7, i tell c needed to prove that it could deliver on its unique premise. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.
The story that immediately followed the initial debut chapter was fine, even if it borrowed a little too heavily from A Study in Scarlet. That’s probably fine: you have to respect the greats. What really rubbed me the wrong way, however, was how the next mystery revealed seemingly too many key story details, too soon: more specifically, the chapter prior to i tell c chapter 7 introduced us to Aioi’s childhood kidnapper, Hikaru Kagamino.
Not only did this feel a little disruptive and a little disrespectful to the actual mystery that was building up in the background (even if the culprit was obvious), but it also deprives the story of such a key trump card at such an early juncture. There’s a reason why main antagonists aren’t usually introduced until a fair way in: the protagonists need room to breathe in the meantime! Take My Hero Academia, for example: it took at least a dozen chapters before Tomura made his appearance proper during the USJ arc. As a result, this doesn’t exactly give me confidence that Kazusa Inaoka knows where they’re taking this series!
Even so, I was prepared to withhold judgement to a certain extent until I saw what Hikaru was actually like as an antagonist in i tell c chapter 7; perhaps he would overwhelm me with his evil charms. Nevertheless, what I found this week was quite disappointing: a character who sees the world entirely as material for their novels, and one that carves their stories into their own arms. Over-the-top doesn’t cut it.
One of the only saving graces of i tell c chapter 7 is how Ukon changes his outlook, recognizing how Aioi’s unconventional approach may have helped them solve a case this time around. Then, he very quickly takes a bullet in the stomach for his trouble: this makes it very clear that this was just a death flag. Whether he lives or dies (who knows), that doesn’t take away from his apparently superficial role in the arc.
I don’t like criticizing things at the best of times, least of all when it is a series such as i tell c that I so desperately wanted to succeed. For all intents and purposes, however, it appears to have confirmed my worst fears: only a genius like Gosho Aoyama can pen a genuinely interesting weekly mystery series without descending into shoddy writing or tired archetypes. Chapter 7 of i can tell c certainly leaves much to be desired.
You can read i tell c chapter 7 for free via VIZ Media.