Dr Stone vol. 1

Creator: Riichiro Inagaki (Writer) & Boichi (Artist)

Publisher: Viz Media

Length:  200 pages (ongoing series)

Dr Stone is an interesting new shonen manga with a lot of potential and some of the coolest artwork i have seen from that genre in years.

The entire human population is suddenly turned to stone, and 3700 years pass by before two japanese highschoolers mysteriously wakes from their stone prisons to an entire new world with almost all traces of civilization wiped away. They now set out on a quest to de-petrify the remaining human statues and restart civilization, one technologic advancement at a time.

The scientific discoveries and the techniques they use to build stuff is always explained, which shows that the team behind this series has done their research and binds the premise to something we can understand from the real world, counter to the magic systems and crazy powers that you normally would see in a series like this.

You can kinda see how that same approach was used for Inagakis last series; Eyehsield 21, a sports manga, where it is paramount for the experience to learn the reader how the sport works and introduce them to the rules in a timely fashion. Now with Dr Stone we instead learn the rules of chemistry, physics, biology and so on with the same attention to rules and systems that you would see in a sports manga.

The primary thing that i hope to see improved are the writing. Though the perspective on science, is great, a lot of the dialog between characters can get kind of corny and weirdly unrealistic, and draws maybe a bit too much inspiration from the old shonen manga tropes that it otherwise does so well to differ from. 

Pros:

• Great stylized artwork
• Unique and fresh premise

Cons:

• weak character writing
• weird dialogs and jokes

7/10 Very good