Zero's Tea Time

"Well, a child's curiosity and a detective's spirit of inquiry... do have much in common, after all."
- Amuro Tooru (Detective Conan, vol 76, chapter 799, p. 14)

In 2018 Detective Conan got its 22nd mainline movie, Zero the Enforcer, which I’ve talked about before. It is a movie that goes more in-depth about the dark side of the justice system and it focuses on Amuro Tooru, one of the smartest characters in the series who is a triple face character that the reader first meets as a waiter whom then becomes a so-called apprentice of the great sleeping Mouri Kogoro,  and I can say that the 22nd film has ended up at the top three or so of my favourite movies from the franchise.

What really makes the movie stand out in the real world however, is that it broke all box office records the series has accomplished so far – raking over 100 million dollars during its run.

This massive popularity the movie gained gave birth to something else, an idea of a collaboration that soon bore fruit. That collaboration was the birth of a new manga which was created between Aoyama Gosho (overseeing the new series) and another lesser-known manga artist named Takahiro Arai (the artist for the drawings), and their manga was dubbed as Zero’s Tea Time (ゼロの日常 Zero no Nichijō).

Now, Zero’s Tea Time basically tells the story of Amuro Tooru outside of the scenes you see in Conan. You get to know how Amuro spends his days and interacts with other people, things and places – even ones from the movies. Some of the events actually require in-depth knowledge of the DC verse and what has gone down in the story so far to pick up on all the places in time where the story of Zero’s Tea Time takes place. The story itself is mostly episodic, but the story's jumps between the events that we are familiar are what makes the story seem very different from practically any other work out there when you get to the nitty and gritty of it all – the story itself is very light-hearted and simplistic as a lot of it is Amuro Tooru simply making food and eating with other characters, however, it’s where all the events are placed in the mainline story that give it more depth. A new reader would probably feel as if they are missing something about Amuro's character every time they read a chapter (to be fair though, the chapters in ZTT are much shorter/lower in condensed content than Gosho Aoyama's DC chapters).

So for people that are not too familiar with Detective Conan I can see that Zero’s Tea Time would seem a lot different than for someone like me who is a huge Conan and Amuro fan, so I can understand all the nuances that make Zero’s Tea Time stand out. For example I can enjoy seeing a chapter showing us Amuro at a shooting range with his underling Kazami (see M22 for Kazami) and I also like how we get to know why and how Amuro is basically a peak human in strength and speed (obviously he’s weaker than Makoto who will also appear in Movie 23); well obviously because he has a special training regimen, but it’s nice to see him train hard on-panel. 

But even without all that, the Conan(series)-styled artwork done by Takahiro Arai really manages to complement the script supervised by Gosho. From what I've seen, most spinoff series in general are not that good-looking (not just character models are off), so I’m actually pretty surprised how this looks like. Arai is very good at paneling - the manga's pages are not just made up of square boxes, but a lot more than that. There is clear creativity at work here that for sure goes underappreciated by many. For example I REALLY like how Arai is capable of making the feel of a flow of time in single panels come to life, ie. in chapter 2 as Amuro is cooking you can feel the time pass in the panel itself as it shows multiple events, or in chapter 5 where Amuro is jumping rope, doing push-ups with one hand and doing lifts, all taking place in one panel and the layout of how he gets closer (character model gets bigger) to the screen during the page. In chapter 15 there is also a remarkably done page where Kazami and Amuro eat curry together. The feel of a flow of time can be felt in the double-spread page with "Scotch" and Amuro as children fishing on the right and the present version of Amuro fishin on the left of the spread as the sun is shown in the horizon beyond the sea, as Amuro spends his time with his eyes closed. That fishing spread done by Arai might not be filled with content but it sure is breathtakingly marvelous in atmosphere, one of the best in the entire franchise.

Aside from that, the color pages look really nice as well; there is some clear creativity in them. I especially like the double-spread page done for chapter 8 or chapter 13 (love this) as well as the panels where Arai imitates Gosho’s art in his own way to pull out different types of expressions for Amuro. The page where he saves his yet-to-be-named dog from getting hit by a car in chapter 9 is a normal page that looks really good all things considered – by that I mean the paneling, layout, art, creativity (making the character model go out of the panels as well as use of SFX effects and blank panel for the conclusive panel of the page) are all very well handled.

The story itself is, as I said, very simple in its core, but there are nice surprises in it for a hardcore Conan fan. I can appreciate the famous lawyer Kisaki Eri’s (Mouri Ran’s mother) secretary Kuriyama Midori appearing at Cafe Poirot where Amuro and Azusa (Poirot main worker who many ship as the perfect girlfriend to Amuro. Though, for Amuro’s girlfriend see M22!) work during daytime and talk about how the sandwiches – made by Amuro – are a being talked about in the legal circles. These kind of things bring Cafe Poirot to life as it’s a clear hot spot for the Beika District residents such as Mouri Detective Agency that live just upstairs, or the Kisaki law offices, and for many more residents.

Reading the series week-to-week however wouldn't be ideal as the pacing is slow, and by that I mean that even though it’s episodic, not much happens in an individual chapter, but collecting all of the little things together, it becomes a very enjoyable read for a long-time fan as there are many moments I can simply stop to appreciate such as Vermouth having sleep problems added on top of everything I've mentioned so far.

The most important aspect of the manga however is to see what drives Amuro forward and how he goes on with his days, how he balances things out in his busy schedules, and how he handles normal life hardships.