Tista: Unedited Audio and Recording Notes (Patreon)

Manga Details

• Author: Endou, Tatsuya
  • Was assistant to Fujimoto as we’ve discussed before, along with the creator of Blue Exorcist, Kono Oto Tomare, and Hell’s Paradise (of which we covered his work Ayashimon)
• Author’s other works:
  • Spy x family and a shitload of oneshots
    • Of note Rengoku no Ashe which Anya from spy x family gets her design and i spy for obvious reasons
  • Rooftop detective light novel did illustration
  • Gekka Bijin was 5 volumes in Jump SQ
• Jump square services which is supposed to be the cool older brother of WSJ
• Run dates: Nov 4, 2007 to Aug 4, 2008
  • Was a brand new magazine so didn’t replace anything
  • Series that replaced it:
    • The Four Kuzumoto Siblings by Satoshi Kinoshita
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• Chapters/Volumes: 9/2

About the Manga

• Plot
  • New York City. A wretched hive of scum and italian gangsters. The mobster known as Stabano Frappechino is taken out with a single bullet by Sister Militia: Catholic Assassin. By night she is a deadly sniper killing bad guys for the church, but by day she’s Tista Lone, a college freshman who was raised at an orphanage run by nuns. Who gives a shit about her tho cuz the real star is here cuz when Tista absentmindedly walks into traffic she’s saved by Arty Drawer: an artist who draws her. Arty lives at the West Geeno museum which definitely exists in new york because he’s also an orphan. The museum owners try to smuggle drugs in his art so Tista kills them but not before a bad guy shoots Arty in his art hand. He brushes it off cuz he’s so cool but Tista feels really bad about it. Arty starts trying to find Tista: basically stalking her and putting his super accurate drawing online. He makes a shitty art piece that everyone thinks is super cool and evocative in universe. It moves everyone who sees it, including Tista who recognizes that it’s a message to her. While this is happening Tista continues murdering bad guys but she’s haunted by the death of her biological father which she blames herself for and was locked in the room with his corpse for like 70 hours or something.
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  • Every kid at the orphanage sometimes has double sharingan and it’s never explained. Tista at least has her dad’s sharingan transplanted into her head and it’s causing her to go blind. Maybe. She’s definitely going blind. Also a detective named Snow is looking for her. Oh god I have to keep writing this. A kid was found murdered by the Red Dog gang. They hate the White Monkey gang because of Japanese metaphors. We meet a little boy named Ligma I mean Pigma Blackmarker who does graffiti believe it or not. He shows up and talks about how he’s excited for his extremely long and successful life. He is immediately murdered by the Red Dogs’ gang leader Mashiro Apes and it doesn’t matter cuz his mom made turkey. Mashiro is killed by Sister Militia somehow but the manga starts getting real tough to follow. Tista starts having a ton of flashbacks about a little girl named Suzy or Suzie depending on the panel. Suzie had a dad unlike Tista, but her dad was abusive. Suzy loved singing so her evil dad crushed her throat and Tista murdered him as her first kill. Flash forward to today and Arty meets his mute friend Suzy and he starts to remember that, oh yeah, they grew up in an orphanage with Tista and were best friends!
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  • The church strip Tista of her license to kill as she starts losing her mind, seeing confusing and difficult-to-follow images of herself as a twisted little child commanding her to kill. The church then tells her she can get her license back if she kills Arty which, as you can imagine, is very sad for her. However when she’s lining up a shot she gets cold feet when ANOTHER catholic assassin starts shooting at Arty, who is totally unphased by getting shot in the limbs. Just then, Snow from the NYPD shows up and starts revealing that she deduced everything. Tista gets big mad about arty getting shot and gets in a sniper duel where both she and the bad guy get shot. Months later Tista wakes up from her coma to see Arty who is visiting her in prison. She got 120 years in prison but is open for parole in about 40 somehow even though she murdered like 50 people who cares. Also her priest friend that I didn’t mention gets murdered by a kid I didn’t mention named Scar Bandaid. He’s named that because he cuts himself and was trained by the assassin from earlier because apparently no one died in that sniper duel.
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• Characters
  • Tista lone
    • Super accurate shy girl
    • Teenager
    • Wears a jester outfit lmao
    • Kinda crazy
    • College student
    • Her fathers left eye that can communicate with her?
  • Arty
    • HIS NAME IS ARTY DROWA
    • Hard headed punk
    • Artist
    • Sits in his room mad at tista for killing
    • I feel he just takes up a lot of space
    • Kinda disappears for a bit? I honestly don’t think he mattered
    • You guys don’t get it. He can save her god dammit!

Why it failed

• This feels like it’s trying to be too punk ya know?
• B A C K G R O U N D S
• This first chapter feels like it’s smarter than it is like duh she’s the assassin or is she? Na but actually… and it just kinda feels like feet dragging
• I feel I had trouble following the panels like making sure I was reading them and the dialog in the right order
• Lmao they point out it’s 200,004,000 like what?
• Writing is so flowery it's hard to follow
• I legit don't know what's going on a lot of starts a lot of plot threads but no resolution on anything early makes it feel pointless
• It does nothing with NYC as a setting why use such a prominent real location?
• Why is tista naked so much
• Lmao these mf really said protect that smile
• This is the dumbest shit
• Lmao oh my god this is stupid

What it did well

• Kinda has a movie-like feel to the layout of panels
• Setting it in NYC is fun idea
• I like the use of establishing panels without dialogue
• The crosshairs cross thing is cute
• The parents mudder art with the black outline was great
• I like the use of paneling a lot of elements breaking out of panels
• The art is absolutely fantastic david doesn’t know what he’s talking about this is fire

Where it could have gone

• Been a bunch of cute assassin girls doing cute assassin girl things
• Actually show the art of assassin like how she scopes a spot her techniques the getaway etc
• Have her kill the wrong person a bystander have some sort of moral dilemma
• Honestly I have no idea what the fuck was going on so maybe have this series make sense and actually run a plotline straight through before getting all weird

Misc Thoughts

• The art style feels so much more rough than spy x family
• It’s interesting spy x family is set somewhere fictional but is blatantly germany while this was set in NYC
• Missed chance to call the cnn parody NYCnn instead of GNN
• I think her dad is a scientologist?
• Big brain the dude that said call an ambulance for a  guy who’s brains are on the floor
• Maxy Bee thoughts:
  • Tista is maybe the first jump square series cancelled
  • Why only maybe? You’ll have to check out his full notes on the patreon! Jk the small tourism/diary manga Living in Akiba by Daisuke Kadokuni ALSO ended in the same issue, but was a small series never meant to even have a volume release, and doesn’t really count
  • Viz Media are publishing this in English in May 2023! It’ll look better than the shit-ass scans!

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary
  • Community
    • Tucker: Japan thinks Americans are all Catholic
    • Maxybee:
    • Orange: i don't remember god allowing murder
    • Bird: Church of Violence, but like... Literal.
    • Resident Warhammer Nerd: Sisters of Battle did it better
    • Riel: The church.....is bad?......no way......
    • ChemyChems: Truly time for John 11:35 (jesus wept)
    • Duderocks: Mother Carmel’s less evil USA branch
    • 090z: Man really named an artist Arty.
    • King of Carrots: Sista Tista never gunna miss ya
    • Engine the Engineer: Ronald Reagan would be really proud
  • David:
    • too much cross in its crosshairs
    • Teenage psycho killer  "Qu'est-ce que c'est"
    • My death note is a gun
    • Every chapter is an anthology series
  • Jordan: I wish my girlfriend killed people
  • Guest:
• Flop or not
  • If flop, what they could read instead
    • Flop read assassination nation or watch John wick
  • If not, how it compares to Chainsaw Man
• Is this the best/worst series we’ve talked about