Afterschool Charisma, Vol. 1

by Kumiko Suekane

Overview

Famous historical figures return as clones, but are they doomed to repeat the fate of their progenitors, or can they create their own destines?

St. Kleio Academy is a very exclusive school. To enroll, a student must be the clone of a famous historical figure. Wolfgang Mozart, Queen Elizabeth, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Adolf Hitler—with such a combustible student body, it’s only a matter of time before the campus explodes!

SHIRO KAMIYA (2XXX– )

The only non-clone at St. Kleio Academy, a school dedicated to the clones of great historical personages. Shiro’s father is a professor at the academy. Why is a regular kid taking classes at the school? Nobody seems to know for sure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421533971
Publisher:	VIZ Media LLC
Publication date:	06/15/2010
Series:	Afterschool Charisma , #1
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	268,794
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.92(h) x 0.66(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Kumiko Suekane worked at a video game company before becoming a successful mangaka. Besides Afterschool Charisma, her other work includes Blood+A, Once Upon a Glashma (Hajimari no Gurashuma) and Seijou Koucha kan no Jijo (The Seijou Teahouse Affair).

Editorial Reviews

With a title right out of a romance manga and a premise that sounds like Clone High, at first glance Afterschool Charisma doesn't seem promising. But that first impression is most emphatically wrong. Suekane's story of a school full of cloned historical geniuses and a very ordinary boy who observes them is another success for Viz's experimental manga line. Cloned for undisclosed and morally dubious reasons, the students include not only the great and the good (Mozart, Marie Curie, Elizabeth I) but also the world-shatteringly brilliant and driven of every stripe (Napoleon, the infamous Dowager Empress Cixi, Hitler). But locking would-be world leaders up in a boarding school and disappearing the more rebellious students to "another school" works about as well as you might expect. Unlikely alliances and conspiracies form--Napoleon will hardly go tamely to his fate, for example, and Sigmund Freud revels in using his cynical psychological insight to be the perfect power behind the throne. Suekane's art is all clean lines and expressive faces, even if the characters look disconcertingly little like their historical counterparts. Tensely plotted and sparkling with sharp dialogue, the story succeeds by not underestimating the intelligence of teenagers, in both its characters and its readers. (June)

Publishers Weekly