"Weirdly thoughtful, thrillingly violent and cheesily sexy, this book is a guilty pleasure and a shameless delight. It's a wonderful glimpse into the future of original English manga."
~Calvin Reid, Publisher's Weekly

When Felipe Smith submitted a story for our Rising Stars of Manga about a frustrated comic book creator who has decided to express his anger at a terribly misguided, conceptually myopic editor by shooting him right through the head, I knew that I wanted to be that editor. But it wasn't just Felipe's audacity that drew me to him. He's got the skill to back it up. And when I started working with him, I learned that Felipe is not some disgruntled, subversive artist on the verge of exploding, but one of the nicest, most inspiring people I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

When we offered him a deal, he opted to continue the story of the frustrated comic book creator, but as time has passed, the story has become about so much more than that. It's about the poverty this creator lives in, it's about the friends that help him out, it's about the streets of LA and the cops and the thugs and the regular people and the tourists and the burger flippers and the yuppies and everyone and everything coming together, living together in an environment that could only be described as absurd...if you didn't live in it every day of your life. And it's funny as hell.

~Luis Reyes, Editor

If he doesn't start bringing in some money soon, Omario's going to have to start flipping burgers at the local MBQ to pay his rent. And as if fighting to stay afloat as an angry comic book artist isn't enough, Omario has to face down with a rookie cop who is struggling with his own anger management problems. Sometimes people are just looking for other people to blame. Omario blames the people that buy comic book crap; and the cop, well, he might just blame Omario.

Felipe Smith:
An American of Jamaican-Argentine descent, he completed his high school studies at the American Community School in Argentina and then went on to pursue a BFA at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago. His ongoing efforts to achieve fame and fortune include: bussing tables in a country club in Indiana, waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant in LA's Westwood, packing boxes, bubble wrapping monitors, and making keys at a postal center, serving soju shots to raucous customers at a Japanese karaoke box, chasing people for unpaid jobs, and placing 1st and 2nd in international and national manga contests. Felipe's work has been published in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, U.K., and Holland. He has also worked as a character designer and animator in the U.S. as well as a cover illustrator for comics.

Omario:
A fine arts institute graduate who owes $25,000 in student loans and doesn't have a job. Wants to be a comic book artist; won't compromise his vision by drawing superheroes.

Officer O'Malley:
Having grown up on the mean streets of East Los Angeles, Aidan Patrick O'Malley has seen his life threatened since a very early age. Living alone with his mother in a small apartment and attending the local public school, O'Malley was subjected to daily torture by the neighborhood bullies. Became a cop—has lots of, umm, emotional baggage.

Jeff:
Though Jeff has ideals and dreams just like Omario (he too has artistic aspirations), he also lives in the real world and understands the importance of paying the bills.

Dee:
Gang leader who traffics in weapons and stolen goods. Though merciless when it comes to business and money, Dee otherwise sounds pretty much like a regular guy. He has a good sense of humor, an endless list of stories, and is knowledgeable on a wide range of topics.

Officer Finch:
O'Malley's training officer. Officer Finch attempts to advise the young and eager rookie on the ways of law enforcement. He's been on the LAPD force for many years and knows the streets well. Years patrolling the streets have taught him to be patient and to think, not always act.

From Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Brian runs a pay-by-the-hour hotel and Korean karaoke bar catering to the musically challenged. Part man, part mountain, Jeff is a well-liked worker at the local McBurger Queen—the MBQ of the title. Hotshot rookie Aidan O'Malley is about to start his first day as a cop, while Dee, a brutal black drug dealer, is making plans to pulverize Richie for stealing from him. Omario, a not-so-secret stand-in for this book's author, just wants to draw completely original comics—comics much like the ones on these very pages. Smith's debut manga shows how these people's lives begin to intersect across the multiethnic urban landscape of Los Angeles. He's created an over-the-top, outrageous, slice-of-L.A. portrait that combines the best of manga—intensely expressive figuration and action, visually rich in emotion and comedy—with a violent and frankly entertaining strand of kick-ass, hip-hop gangsta sensibility. From the image of huge but nimble Jeff serving burgers to a couple of hilarious porn-addicted East Indian clerks, Smith takes the reader on a wild ride through the neighborhoods, nationalities and lowlifes of L.A., pausing only to deliver a talk-to-the-camera manifesto on the existential demands of making great comics. Weirdly thoughtful, thrillingly violent and cheesily sexy, this book is a guilty pleasure and a shameless delight. It's a wonderful glimpse into the future of original English manga.

~Calvin Reid

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From IGN Comics

Not your everyday manga, that's for sure!

"If you've gotten sick of spandex, demons, magical blades, role playing card games and the like, then you've been waiting for MBQ, TOKYOPOP's new manga by Felipe Smith.... MBQ is, hands down, one of the best manga I've ever read."

~KJB

Copyright © IGN Entertainment, Inc.

From Manga Life

For a while I wondered what MBQ stood for. Evidently it's McBurger Queen, the fictitious fast-food restaurant that plays a small part (so far) in this first volume, but in this volume that's less important, but for the introduction of Jeff, an MBQ employee and lead character Omario's housemate.

Smith does a good job of characterisation, helped in part by his expressive artwork, giving each character a very separate identity. Omario proves to be a likeable character, and with his interactions with Dee and Jeff, you start to take an interest in who he is.

Where MBQ really shines, however, is in Smith's artwork. It's energetic, detailed, and as I said before, expressive. His character designs are superb, and rival those of Santa Inoue, someone who Smith clearly has a great deal of respect for with a volume of the Tokyo Tribes comic making a cameo. Smith also handles action scenes well, with the store hold-up being impressively realised. One thing I can't shake off, about his art, is that I know it from somewhere. I'm not sure where, but it does have a familiar, yet unique, quality to it.

Of TOKYOPOP's current Western manga line-up, I consider this by far the best, as it has all of the hallmarks of Japanese comics, without the deficiencies many Western creators bring from Western comics. To be honest, I'd say it even ranks alongside their more prestigious translated books, but adds a unique American brand to it. I can't wait to see more from Felipe Smith, and certainly look forward to more MBQ.

~Kevin Hill

Copyright © Manga Life

From Ain't It Cool News

Pick up a copy of MBQ early. It's a ground floor opportunity. Later, you're going to want to be able to say you were into Felipe Smith's work before he became really popular. Think Jhonen Vasquez. The style is dissimilar, but as a comic writer / illustrator ready to convey something new and sure to catch, its that he's a least on par. Smith's style is solidly his own, not parading allegiance to American or manga comic styles. He's developed the current style that comic companies have been hoping to find or manufacture, and his ability to shift from kinetic motion, to brutality or vulgarity, to sight gag to character moments without forcing context shift by changing stylization makes for a dynamic read that will entertain anyone, but really impress comic fans. The talent is shown off in simple cases like turning a steamy sex scene into a vomit joke, or in the volume's sequential art opus, horny twenty-somethings, to ethnic jokes, to hard edged violence, which morphs into top notch comic-adapted movie-style action (always impressive to see done well) and finally into some chilling character work.

MBQ has the frenetic bounce of its hero, who's chomping at the bit, not sleeping in an attempt to fit more work into the day. It opens with the bleeding, struggling artist, attempting to sustain himself on vending machine Doritos on his way to attempt to sell back a gun to a jacked thug for rent money. The linked vignettes spiral through the world around our hero into the lives of a white bread super-cop with some not so well suppressed issues stemming from having grown up in a notorious project, a gargantuan fast food prodigy, a harried karaoke clerk and the like. The flow results in a great struggling artist story set in a caricature of modern life: part urban myth, part mission statement. More as points of comparisons than influences: kind of Barton Fink, meets The Shield, meets South Park.

Remarkably, Smith is able to work the irreverent offensiveness, the fondness for the characters, and the brutality into his own distinctive style. While illustration is the incredibly impressive front facing aspect to his work, he is also able to pair it with dialog that works as well as any in comics, and better than the great majority. Not just the distinctive voices for the diverse personalities, or that he has down the linguistic characteristics that plenty of other writers fail at while faking, but that he's able to have everyone sounding right, and not that the writer is showing off. No one's over-witty. Humor comes from the personalities and situations rather than a forced hand.

~Scott Green

Copyright © Harry Knowles