Candy and Cigarettes

Candy & Cigarettes is a manga I picked up half as a joke, initially expecting a trashy loli comedy along the lines of "Kill Me Baby", with some crime elements sprinkled in. However, I was very pleasantly surprised at the high quality of the art, story and characters, as well as the general lack of fanservice. Instead, C&C serves a quick-witted, fast-paced and fun crime action story, with just the right amount of comedy occasionally popping up here and there. The author's love for film noir and classic American crime stories shines through every page, with the story and artstyle both emitting a strong vibe of westerninfluence. As is the nature of spy/assassin stories, C&C follows an episodic style of the main duo getting a "job" and them executing it. However, a simple yet clever backstory is spun around the main characters, that ends up connecting quite nicely to a story divided into several arcs. Overall, the pacing is very honest, giving us action and cool fights when we want them, as well as calm dialogue scenes as breaks in-between, giving us time to breathe and avoiding the action becoming too loud and unejoyable. Unfortunately, C&C does suffer from a few classic problems/tropes for this type of story. There, again, we see the inspiration by American works of the like, reminding also of the early James Bond movies at times. Namingly: 1. There are apparently no other spies/assassins who could fight against evil conspiracies in the entire world. For some wild reason, the main duo has to do everything by themselves. 2. As a direct result, the kill:death ratio is absolutely insane, with our protagonists basically committing genocide, if you add it all up. 3. As a direct result, the story ends up being laughably predictable. But I am willing to accept those for the sake of a fun read. The author clearly intended for it to be this way, aiming to achieve exactly that type of story. And I will concede that he does make occasional attempts at justifying these points. Aside from this, C&C does suffer from a handful of plain logical errors in the writing, that are difficult to overlook. And one more unfortunate thing I will point out and don't think can be excused, is the sudden surge of clearly fanservice shots of our underage main girl from volume 2 onwards. It's a very stark contrast between volume 1 and 2, so I personally suspect that the publisher asked the author to spice it up a bit to make the series more attractive, or something like that. That wouldn't be the first time I see that. These shots don't take away anything, but they certainly don't add anything either. It just feels unnecessary. So, in conclusion, 7/10. Fun, action, good pacing, hits the mark for the genre. If you want deep, complex plot and character development, probably not. This isn't an outstanding work nowadays, simply due to the fact that the main inspiriation seems to be material that is itself pretty outdated. But Candy & Cigarettes is very good at what it does, so if you are into this type of story, 100% recommend.