How Awesome Is Project X: Seven Eleven?
Awesome Plus Ten.
After the Cup Noodle book, I thought maybe I'd be done with my exuberance at watching a salaryman get some victory out of an untenable situation, but upon seeing Toshifumi Suzuki and Hideo Shimizu's determined faces after they saw their future in a convenience store, I had to see what was going to happen next. Hell, I even ended up buying a second cup of coffee so I could justify taking up the space at Diesel Cafe while I finished the book on the spot.
This volume greatly benefits from having an emotional centerpiece in the form of a small businessman mired in the company's problems getting the convenience store idea started. Kenji Yamamoto placed his family's future in the hands of Ito-Yokada after seeing an ad in the newspaper and thinking anything had to be better than the paltry profits his liquor store was generating. His arc gives the readers a touchstone that wouldn't have existed with descriptions of an inaugural location that had problems performing.
While we now how this story ends from the fact that there's a business success manga written about it, the Project X series manages to help readers view profit margins and business presentations into the epic things that the characters see them as. This is the sort of comic I'd love to see take off and wonder if sales would increase if DMP offered this in an English-style left-to-right format, removing one of the stupidest barriers that exists in the minds of bookstore buyers and educators.
