Bakuman - Episode 9

Episode eight saw our two wannabe manga artists making significant progress towards achieving their dream, but still not enough to satisfy them as they just miss out on a Tezuka award.  Still, all of this was overshadowed by the goings-on at the end of the instalment, with Akito's temper boiling over and landing him in trouble.

Unsurprisingly, Akito's punishment for punching a schoolmate is a one week suspension from school, although Akito himself seems quite happy to look on the bright side of this - it does give him plenty of time to write ideas for the pair's next manga after all.  The other arguably good news to come from this is that Akito and Moritaka's manga writing exploits are now known by all and sundry, making them small-time heroes around the school - not that this particularly seems to please Moritaka, who is still stinging from the thought that it was his artwork that denied them a shot at winning a Tezuka award.  Indeed, it's Moritaka's depression that becomes the focus of this episode initially, until some words immortalised in manga form by his uncle (let's ignore the fact that said words are meaningless bullshit, shall we?) give him renewed hope and confidence.

With such worries out of the way, Moritaka finally decides its time to visit Akito's home while he remains suspended from school - only to walk into what can only be described as some tense moments before the outbreak of World War III.  It seems that Akito's moment of madness has finally brought the simmering feelings of a couple of girls to a head, and unfortunately for him both Miyoshi and Iwase have chosen the same moment to pay him a visit.  Akito's attempts to talk himself out of this mess aren't exactly the stuff of legend, but somehow the situation resolves itself surprisingly easily (although not without a bout of violence) in the end, leaving Akito with a tricky customer of a girlfriend to contend himself with.

Although it threatened to spend a little too long on Moritaka feeling sorry for himself, this was a pretty fun episode of Bakuman all in all - no real progress on the manga making front, but it was a more light-hearted instalment than I was expecting after Akito's violent affray last episode, and it gave us the measure of a few of the show's other characters to round them out a little bit.  That might not make for the most memorable twenty minutes of anime ever but hey, it was likeable enough to satisfy me, and it looks like we'll be seeing a whole lot more of Ayase going forward.