Review : Bleach.

After death, some souls linger in this world. Left to loiter and brood long enough and they turn into hollows, huge deadly masked creatures invisible to the living who eat souls and people alike. Unfortunately for high school student, Ichigo Kurosaki who can see ghosts, hollows prefer to hunt the those with a strong sensitivity to the world of the dead.

Soul reapers, dressed in black and wielding swords formed from their own soul are tasked with killing hollows and protecting innocents. Rukia, a female, dark haired soul reaper is tracking a hollow hunting Ichigo and his family. When things go wrong and Rukia is injured, Ichigo makes the choice to borrow Rukia's powers and become a temporary soul reaper in order to save his family. Afterward Ichigo is forced to take on Rukias soul reaper duties until she gets her power pack and unwillingly some of Ichigo's friends and schoolmates are drawn into the esculating conflict in the world of the dead. Unfortunately, Ichigo's borrowing of soul reaper powers also goes against the laws of the soul reaper society and when found out, Rukia is taken by her fellow soul reapers and found punishable by execution.

Ichigo is the primary protagonist of bleach, a 15 year old that looks more like hes 20. Ichigo has the typical "I don't know what I'm doing, but I will stand up for what I believe in!" attitude of most shonen jump heroes. When turned into a soul reaper Ichigo wields a gigantic blade to supplement his head-first attitude. Although bleach has a huge supporting cast, Rukia can be considered the main supporting protagonist. Shes short and overly serious but has a cute side displayed through means such as her terrible artwork and love of bunnies. She also actually looks like shes 15 but claims to be over 100 years old, quite the opposite of Ichigo. Other members of the supporting cast include Orihime, a shy, comical girl, who acts a healer. Chad, a huge Mexican with incredible strength and Ishida, a priest like archer who hates soul reapers a lot. The cast is rather varied and helps keep the manga interesting, as well as perhaps helping to draw it out.

Bleach's art and style relies more heavily on action and movement than on each frame being an individual work of art. Tite Kubo also has a good sense of style and shows in most of his characters, in particular what they wear. Besides the fashion sense, nothing really stands out about the art, but there's nothing drawn badly enough for you to stop reading, which in reality means the art has done it's part in telling the story efficiently. Since most of the fighting is not incredibly realistic and more often than not is against a fifteen foot monster, it can easily be read by a broad age group.

Bleach is a great modern world/fantasy cross over, it's has a broad range of characters all interesting and cool in their own way. The idea of sharing a world with spirits obviously isn't incredibly unique, but bleach still has a good go at the concept and obviously did something right as it is currently one of the more popular manga titles out there.