Here is an excerpt of a recent manga review of the popular HK series “Feel 100%” by Tom Baker:
On the cover of the Hong Kong manga Feel 100 Percent, Jerry’s shirtlessness reveals his muscley torso, and his low-slung jeans reveal the waistband of his Dolce and Gabbana underwear. On the first inside pages, American Jerry’s handsome Chinese friend Lok keeps his jeans up with a big-buckled Armani belt, above which he wears an ostentatiously labeled Calvin Klein T-shirt.
The characters’ love of brand-name clothes is a trait they presumably share with their creator, Lau Wan Kit, who generously scatters names and logos such as Polo, Izod, DKNY, Benetton, Max Mara and Paul Smith throughout the text and pictures of this manga.
Actually, the book refers to itself with the Chinese word “manhua,” but the 1992-2007 series was manga enough to win the this year’s second annual International Manga Award, which was created by the Foreign Ministry.
The manga has been published in Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Korean, Indonesian and Italian, and now, thanks to a small British publisher called Bamboo Press, English-language readers finally can see what all the fuss is about.
Judging by the first volume (the second and third should be out in the near future), the series is a fantasy whose main audience must be heterosexual boys in their mid-teens. On top of being well coiffed and snazzy dressers, best friends Lok and Jerry are pick-up artists par excellence, enticing a parade of lovely ladies into their beds. They are also artists of a more literal sort, working together for an advertising company in a glamourous Hong Kong office and living in a beautifully maintained three-story house in the heart of that expensive city.