Alice in the Country of Joker: Circus and Liar's Game

Bishounenized desecration of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: We Live in a Society boogaloo Circus and Liar's Game suffers from the same fault as most Kuni no Alice manga do – a lot of the content feels inconsequential. It wastes way too much time with Alice meeting the characters, characters that the reader is expected to know already anyway. While brief introductions, with the numerous casts this franchise has, it adds up to practically few volumes to even get the story going. And it’s just not interesting when it has been done many, many times over and over. In general, this is pretty much a typical pieceof the franchise, but being one of the few spin-offs with more volume count, it gets a chance to try for an actual story for a change, so because of that it is among the better executed spin-offs. It even has some parts that I’ve actually liked, like the whole concept of exploring feeling of guilt and a metaphor of prison where only the prisoners can free themselves (though this being Wonderland, the metaphor is presented literally). Alice’s sister also plays a larger role in this part, which is nice. If the first 4 to 5 volumes were condensed more so it wouldn’t feel so filler-ish, I would even be inclined to rate this higher. The art is not bad, especially when compare to a typical shoujo/josei artstyle, it doesn’t skip on drawing the background too much and the anatomy isn’t overly exaggerated. Overall, I would recommend this one to Kuni no Alice fans, and maybe some who aren’t part of the fanbase might enjoy it too, though I won’t guarantee that.