tl;dr: A mess of a manga that has a shock and awe of blood and gore but nothing else. Smokin’ Parade is a manga about a group of fighters known as the Jackalopes who have been installed with mechanical combat implants in order to fight monsters known as Spiders, which seem to randomly emerge as a result of a reaction between some people and organ transplants from a certain megacorp. As far as the good points of this manga go, it has quite a lot of blood, guts, gore, and body horror and it’s drawn pretty horrifically. If that’s all you want from this manga this’llbe a really solid read. If you want anything more at all from this manga, then you’ll be left wanting.

The most obvious issue is that there’s no sense of direction to things whatsoever. The overarching plot is complete nonsense and the world building makes no sense. The smaller level stories are character focused, but characters are also terrible written with character arcs and development that is incredibly abrupt and really forced. The protagonist, Youkou, especially makes very little sense and the attempt at trying to show character growth in him was laughable. The main cast have pretty bizarre and extreme personalities, so that makes them somewhat interesting for a bit, but as a group they have no chemistry and the interactions and bonds between them aren’t all that strong. On top of that they’re just not all that likable. Thus, it’s really hard to get invested in their struggles and the attempts at trying to hit emotional beats pretty much always fall flat. Thus, the story just overall isn’t very good.

Just as big of an issue is that this manga just doesn’t seem that cool. The mangakas’ earlier work, Deadman Wonderland, also had a lot of issues regarding plot and characters, but it was really strong in sticking to it’s edgy rule of cool, and that was enough to hold it up. This manga just doesn’t manage to do that. The themes it touches on, such as human desires or family, are so weak that it’s not even fair to call them superficial, they’re barely even window dressing. The use of motifs and allegories is pretty weak. There’s a bit of psychological horror here and there but it really doesn’t feel like the manga is trying that hard at it, giving much more of an emphasis to an endless stream of violence that loses its impact pretty quickly. The general sense of style is a mish mash of cyberpunk, steampunk, and biopunk that feels haphazard. The action just isn’t as awesome, with no real progression to abilities, powers that aren’t eye catching, and just in general lackluster fights that are never really all that exciting.

The art I feel is actually worse than Deadman Wonderland, or at the minimum the design work is definitely worse. Deadman Wonderland was also full of extreme violence but could look genuinely beautiful at times. Smokin’ Parade never does, and as a result the art just feels dull.